May 2008 Archives
After a month of having moved to L.A. from San Francisco, I keep on seeing and hearing things that make this place feel large and alien and discomfiting. Seriously, what is the human mind to do when confronted by the sight of a person driving 60 miles per hour in a convertible with the top down on their residential street, blaring that Linkin Park song from Transformers? I mean, I know what I’d wanted to say after the fact — “Pardon me, miss, but the fact that you like things that are bad is making the world a worse place. …” But, of course, in a great demonstration of l’esprit d’escalier, it came to me long after she was well down the block, and probably mowing down senior citizens. Or my accidental tour, courtesy of Google Maps, of several of L.A.'s worst neighborhoods after getting wildly lost on my way to a screening. (And yes, I was scared, and I'll tell you why. Outside my car: Aimless, well-built youths who did not look like the Bush tax cuts were elevating the nature of their lives. Inside my car: Me, in my dorky glasses and porkpie hat. The car: A silver VW New Beetle. Frankly, if I lived in any neighborhood and had a beef with the way things were and I drove by in my little clown soap dish car in my dorky porkpie hat, I would drag myself from the vehicle and beat me like I was medieval laundry.)
So, this is where you'll find that stuff -- about living in L.A., about being a mediocre writer, about being a critic, about being me.
